GitHub’s Open Source Survey Highlights Challenges of Industry

by Ben Pearson

June 6th, 2017

GitHub has published the results of their 2017 open source survey that highlights many of the challenges the open source industry is currently facing. They “collected responses from 5,500 randomly sampled respondents sourced from over 3,800 open source repositories on GitHub.com, and over 500 responses from a non-random sample of communities that work on other platforms”.

The primary findings include

Documentation is highly valued, frequently overlooked, and a means for establishing inclusive and accessible communities.

Negative interactions are infrequent but highly visible, with consequences for project activity.

Open source is used by the whole world, but its contributors don’t yet reflect its broad audience.